Mushroom multiplication from a flash of lightning?

According to a Japanese farming folklore, mushroom harvest will be good when there’s a lot of lightning. Sounds like nonsense? Not so fast: scientists have discovered that electricity does make some species of mushroom multiply.

As part of a four-year study, scientists in northern Japan have been bombarding a variety of mushrooms in lab-based garden plots with artificially induced lightning to see if electricity actually makes the fungi multiply…

The latest results show that lightning-strength jolts of electricity can more than double the yield of certain mushroom species compared with conventional cultivation methods.

“We have tried these experiments with ten types of mushroom so far and have found that it is effective in eight species,” said Koichi Takaki, an associate professor in engineering at Iwate University.

“We saw the best effects in shiitake and nameko mushrooms, while we also tested reishi mushrooms, which are not edible but are used in certain types of traditional Chinese medicine,” he said.